I think to get around the kind of issue you describe I'll need to not have too much involvement between characters in any one character's playthrough, which I think may not be how you were envisioning your version of this kind of scenario in your game . My characters will be operating in the same timeline, but with their own missions and paths that are not necessarily intertwined in each level. Eg when playing A, you won't often be directly involved with B and C in the same level at all. A is flying to some position to recover Blue Widget while B would be staying behind to defend their main ship. Because each character as I envision it now has their own "job" (eg A is a Scout, B is a Defender/Fighter), they will have different kinds of missions and objectives that are designed for their role and while they'll be going through the same journey from Day 1 to Day X, they will (mostly) be doing so in different locations, scenarios, and kinds of objectives.

Fair enough

Keeping character-level interaction low certainly simplifies things. But in that case what will be the story that is told from different perspectives?

1. Backstory - just reveal different pieces of full puzzle in different paths. IMHO backstories are overused - but they may also be very addictive if you have/are a good writer.
   
2. No story at all - only general references to previous missions. Links between playthroughs are implemented simply via game mechanics.
   

The second variant is more interesting for me (although you can probably mix tory and game mechanics too).
For example it can be used to make quite logical level/difficulty system. At first playthrough you are completely free to choose pacing, mission order and so on. On second you are constrained by previous one. On third you are constrained by both previous one etc.

Whether you want it to be sections within the main story or as an incentive to replay the game will probably force you into completely different design decisions.

Either as a chain of three interchangeable campaigns, with major events consistent and safe to work with, or you'll have extensively test where the player's actions are allowed to change the results. Might also be a good idea to set hard limits to make sure they can't make another section too difficult to play through as well - In your example about retrieving the widget, taking far too long with Character A might make it too difficult to keep B alive. It's also a little unfair if the default values for B's mission are more preferable than the version you saved with using a mediocre performance by A.

Games like StarCraft and Kingdom Under Fire run the "same place, different perspective" narrative very well, but by necessity the events are strictly canonized and stick to a linear result. Either you win "their way" or else you can't progress/lose outright. I think SC also preferred that you play each campaign through sequentially, and didn't unlock the next race until you'd put in at least a few levels into the preceding one, so you were forced to learn the basics from one point of view before the others. That doesn't sound like the way you'd hoped to structure your game, though.

You might look to Mass Effect's 'mutable' storyline system for tips, but it was little more than a series of flags that controlled very small issues. Most were generally self-contained and there didn't seem to be a lot of interaction between results unless they were already heavily involved with each other.

American Nightmare also had you run through each section three times as the story progressed, but varied the content by making the characters aware they were "caught in a loop." On revisiting an area, things you had figured out the first time might no longer be necessary to do, or taken care of by friendly NPCs now aware of the plot. Some objectives were designed to only need to be done once, too. (E.g. Instead of using a key, a pass-coded door is an obstacle the first time, but your character still remembers the code next time and can focus on doing different objectives instead.) This might be an option if you want to skip some sections if they were already played through by another character, letting the next player do a completely different sub-mission that gives more insight into the story.

If you're going to go with a mutable storyline, I strongly advise you get every single design decision and flag onto paper first, because you will be erasing and timelining it repeatedly until you've got it fully fleshed out. Trying to keep track of that many story variables while you're coding it will get more tangled than a string of Christmas lights.

Thanks for your feedback, Mito!

Lauris, the story could still be told from different perspectives. My story, for example, involves a number of people attempting to survive on a spaceship on a journey between two planets. My female character's main job is that of a Scout. My male character's main job is essentially of a Defender. The first "encounter" of the game involves the ship going past the moon, where character A's job is to bring back Blue Widget. In the meantime (simultaneously) character B would be defending the main ship against attack. So even though the two characters are not in the same exact place on their mission when they are being played, they are in the same general time and are able to pick up different pieces of information over the course of their personal missions (in my case through gathering rubble from their kills). Therefore they see the same overarching journey differently.

Thanks, Haps, I'll check out all of the examples you mention. I think I'll definitely have to contain how much impact each character can have on the next playthrough. I want there to be some influence ideally, to where you would notice that your past history is impacting the current playthrough to an extent, but I don't think that being able to completely change major events or the outcome of the entire journey is necessary for the direction I had in mind (at least as it stands now). The goal is more to allow the player to piece together parts of this story through different characters' "simultaneous" experiences. I'll definitely aim to get all of this down on paper before building this entire structure.

I've played Live a Live. The innuendos were not as obvious (you didn't always have player 1 onscreen when playing player 2's walkthough) but stories criss-crossed in such a way that it was refreshing.
Overally, I feel like this really gives confidence to the player in the script and narrative. It shows there was a lot of thinking in making it right. It really reinforces the positive opinion the player has over it because it is tangible evidence of quality.

I always liked this idea, my favourite episode of the simpsons follows a similar structure. And provides some interesting material for this kind of scenario.

Looking at it through a story-biased lens:

I think the best way to do this kind of thing is to take as much advantage of it as possible. Players should be rewarded for participating in the different views, they should see and experience things unique to their character.

But they should also find things that are not explained from their play through. Thus adding an additional reward for players who are playing a second or third character as they find story clues that only make sense because of their earlier playthroughs. This could even involve events where the player has to contend with the after effects of actions taken by one of the other playable characters(but they wouldn't know that one of the other characters had caused them, unless they had already finished one of the other playthroughs).

And now to reverse everything I've said, A single playthrough should still feel like a whole complete story. So it should have a sense of accomplishment and should leave the player feeling like they resolved whatever story based threats were revealed to their character. Otherwise, while playing all three characters would be rewarding, playing only one would be disorienting and present an story that feels incoherent.

Thanks, Orymus, that was the idea here as well - you are in the same time, but you are not necessarily always in the same space as the other characters. Eg one character's mission could be to explore a location while another character's simultaneous mission could be to retrieve something from a different nearby location.

In terms of giving confidence to the player - I can see what you mean, but it's also very easy to screw this kind of thing up if I don't structure each story properly, which would have the opposite effect.

thePyro, this is going to be one of the biggest challenges - making each playthrough satisfying while still making the player curious about what they could find out in other playthroughs and tying them all together. Should be interesting to try to write!

I love multiple perspective structure, which makes the player try to puzzles together all the answers and fill in the blanks rather than spoon feeding a rather straight forward story from one perspective. Such structure often gives an impression of a bigger world too, when not everything resolves around one character but is all mixed and matched.

One of my favorite examples comes from anime called When The Cicadas Cry. It uses a different and more intriguing, imho, structure than one you described. The way it goes is that the series is divided into four "question" story arcs and four "answer" arcs. Each question arc tells same story but from the perspective of different characters, often with different event results (someone dies in one arc, but survives in other), yet succeeding to keep main background story the same. As you can guess from the name, it mainly rises questions as well as explains what is going on with each character as you see the story from their perspective. Then we have answer arcs which provide tidbits of answers to each other and question arcs.

It's a cool way to keep the watcher intrigued as you cant predict exact outcome of events in every arc despite following story similar to previous one, all while they are keeping the main story intact, feeding you tidbits of clues.

When implementing such different perspective story in a game, it may be a good idea to make drastically different gameplay for each of the characters to keep things fresh. One character could be engaging in gun battles while other is all about hacking computers to avoid direct encounters. Or it may be enough with slight mechanics variations. I checked your game out on your blog; you probably thought of it already, but it could be interesting to have variations such as one character is a pilot and the game plays as an Asteroids alike game, while the one staying on the ship plays in a complete different manner, solving tech problems instead of engaging in action. Although it would be bit of a challenge to avoid alienating players when switching from one kind of gameplay to other.

Lastly I find it much more interesting story telling wise when you build the multiple perspective story in a way that when experienced from a second perspective it completely changes the meaning of events you experienced in first perspective. This way, instead of telling parts of same story you first tell a coherent story from first perspective then tell it in a different way that completely changes the way player perceived events in the first play through. A simple example is first story telling of a crew member who sacrificed his life in an attempt to diffuse a bomb while later arc reveals that it was in fact him who set it in the first place. It turns the players view on the story upside down, making him unsure what to expect and wanting to find out more, to find out whether his new guess is accurate.

Basically you tell the story in a coherent A(a1-a2-a3)-B-C way in first perspective, where event A is detailed event from that first character perspective and B is something that happened on the ship which first character heard about. But second perspective reveals much deeper A-B(b1-b2-b3)-C details of B that changes the way it was perceived when you player first characters perspective.

Phew.. Hopefully that made sense. Also, high five for Ukraine game devs in Stockholm o/

You've brought up some really interesting points, Cronnix. I was definitely hoping to work in the kind of perspective shift you described (with your bomb diffusion example). I haven't yet decided to what extent I'll apply this throughout the storyline (as this entire thing can get very tangled with so many perspective shifting elements!), but it's on my list of things to try.

I also see your point about having the gameplay be different. While I still plan the core of the gameplay to be the same for each character (a multi-directional shooter), each character is planned to have its own job/role on this big journey, so will lean toward different types of objectives (one might get more exploration missions, another more defence missions, etc). I definitely want the experience of each character to be different and think that these kinds of mission type changes coupled with each character going through their own version of the journey in terms of narrative should accomplish that if I manage to do it right.

Yesterday and today I've been writing the overall "saga" of this journey - what happens with the main ship itself - and taking down notes of which major events can turn into missions for each character. Once I know what happens on this big adventure I can break scenarios off of it and turn them into individual missions. Then I was going to drill down further into each other and decide exactly what each player finds out in each one, and how it connects to the others' discoveries in the same timeline.